I am a Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies, an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and a core faculty member of the World Cinemas Program at McGill University in Tiohtiá:ke, now known as Montréal, situated on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation.
My first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), analyzes political avant-garde filmmaking and its appropriation of journalism and media events in 1960s Japan. The book received the 2014 Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
My second book, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022), traces the technological, institutional, and geopolitical connections between Japan and the United States that led to the historical development of artificial fog, weather control, networked computing, cybernetic environments, and metabolic architecture in the 20th century.
I am currently completing my third book, Visual Grammars of Deep Time: Archipelagic Archives of the Anthropocene (under contract, Duke University Press). This book explores the visualization of "deep time" through scientific atlases, photographs, films, and classifications of fossils, clouds, snow, and coral reefs in relation to the settler colonial histories of geosciences in Japan, the Pacific, and North America.
I am also working on another book project, Enchanted Consultation, which examines the cultural techniques and technological media of prediction and divination through histories of modern astronomy and computing and what has been termed "pseudoscience," such as astrology and geomancy.
My work has also appeared in many journals, including Public Culture, Representations, Grey Room, Media+Environment, Screen, Animation, and e-flux.
I am also a member of an international D4 research collective for Research for Ethical Speculative Design, Environmental Media Lab, The Platform Lab, Global Emergent Media Lab, and Grierson Research Group.
I have also delivered public lectures at Onassis, Centre Never Apart and MUTEK.
